Positions on firearms control range from "Only police and
soldiers should have guns!" -- a classic recipe for the easy formation
of a police state any time the government gets itself into trouble --
to "There should be no laws about guns whatever!" -- a classic
recipe for national chaos whenever the nation divides over some major
political, social or ethnic question.

The root question is: "Who should be allowed legal, unsupervised
access to and use of firearms?"

I say that is the root question, because once legal, unsupervised
access has been granted, there is no practical way to exercise any effective
control over what the person with access will do with the firearm. One
can write laws and regulations until the cows come home -- but they will
only be obeyed if the person chooses to obey them. From that, it logicially
follows that certain classes of people should be denied legal, unsupervised
access to and use of firearms.

The three classes that should be denied access are the untrained,
the incompetent and the malicious. It is folly to give a loaded firearm
to a person who does not know how to handle it safely, to one who has
been proved untrainable (for any one of a wide variety of reasons) or
to one who wants the firearm to facilitate his injuring, robbing or raping
of others.

This raises an obvious question. How do we determine which people
are untrained, incompetent or malicious?

Of course, no system will ever be able to answer perfectly. The
best available system is already in use, in many other fields. We already
use it to control legal, unsupervised access to and use of many things
-- aircraft, automobiles, explosives, pesticides, anaesthetics -- the
list is long.

Broken down to bedrock, that system seeks favorable answers to
three questions:

Does the applicant know how to handle and use this class of
equipment safely for this class of purpose?

Does this applicant know the rules?

Is this applicant the kind of person who obeys the rules?

If -- and only if -- three favorable answers are given, then the
system should allow legal, unsupervised access and use of equipment which
would be dangerous if in the hands of someone untrained, incompetent or
malicious..

But where would we get answers to such questions? Let us turn
to an area where we already use that system -- control of legal, unsupervised
access to and use of aircraft, and study how it is done..

Training a new aircraft pilot is a matter of teaching while under
the supervision of a qualified Instructor. If the student pilot proves
to be unteachable, he or she fails the course -- and does not qualify
for legal, unsupervised access. That takes care of the safe-use capability
qualification and the knowledge of the rules (also part of the training)
qualification questions.

The third question can only be partly answered by the Instructor.
The Instructor is the only person who studies the student during a relatively
long training period, and is the only person who has observed how the
student behaves while actually in (supervised) control of the equipment
-- equipment which is dangerous to others if the person using it is untrained,
incompetent, or malicious.

Put yourself, for a moment, in the shoes of the Instructor. You
have a student pilot who cannot be made safe, because the student does
not do the correct things, even when shown how and why that is the only
safe behavior. Would you certify this person by stating that the student
deserves favorable answers to those three questions -- knowing that the
student will be sharing the same skies with you, once the student becomes
a licensed pilot?

I thought not.

Certification by an Instructor -- to a reasonable standard --
is the core and key to a practical system. It works elsewhere -- not perfectly,
but better than anything else we know -- so why not use it for firearms?

There is one extra, above and beyond the capability of the Instructor
to answer. Part of the answer to the third question must come from a police
check of the student's criminal record. That is not unusual -- it is,
for example, a requirement for gaining a taxi driver's license in most
jurisdictions. A serious and recent criminal record is a record of disobeying
the rules that a civilized society lives by.

Having outlined the fundamentals, let us proceed to the next level.
A pilot's license that certifies a pilot as qualified to fly a small aircraft
by day may well not certify him or her as qualified to fly a big jetliner
full of passengers through a thunderstorm at midnight. There is a basic
level, and there are advanced levels of qualification.

In the firearms control system devised by Canada's National Firearms
Association, levels are taken into consideration. That is done much like
the pilot's license system -- by dividing the qualifications into qualifications
for the types of equipment, and for their handling in certain areas of
use.

Equipment is divided into four classes: rimfire long arms -- all
rimfire firearms over 26"/660mm long; handguns -- all firearms capable
of firing when less than or equal to 26"/660mm long; centrefire long
arms -- all centerfire firearms over 26"/660mm long; and all full
automatic firearms.

Uses are divided into six classes: possession -- for collectors
who never load a firearm; basic -- for those who shoot on basic shooting
ranges; advanced -- for those who shoot on advanced ranges, where the
shooting requires drawing a loaded firearm or carrying one from place
to place; field -- for use in areas other than shooting ranges where shooting
is allowed; professional -- for firearms salesmen, expert witnesses, gunsmiths,
etc.; and police -- for everyone who carries a loaded firearm to protect
human life from criminal violence.

The firearms permit is divided into a 4 X 6 grid of qualification
entry boxes.

Only the military and the RCMP are exempt from requiring the "police"
certification. The requisite qualification standard to get that certification
of qualification is that t`qhe student must attain all the relevant standards
required by an RCMP constable. In one stroke, that imposes a national
standard on local police, armed security guards, and anyone else who wants
or needs that form of carry permit.

It is rather a neat standard that is set by that requirement.
It is most difficult to attack without claiming that the RCMP are not
qualified well enough to be allowed to carry arms, and yet it is quite
an attainable standard.

Both of the extreme positions cited at the beginning of this article
are both impossible to attain in our society, and probably would do more
harm than good if actually attained. The system of firearms control proposed
above is simple, cheap to operate, and as protective of society as is
reasonably possible. Additional controls added to it, if closely examined,
will be found to add nothing worthwhile. If adopted as regulatory legislation,
it is about the best we can do.

One other unusual feature of that proposed legislation -- a person
who commits a crime with a weapon while in possession of a valid firearms
permit gets a stiffer sentence than one who commits the same crime but
does not have a firearms permit. That is because the person with a permit
has committed a breach of trust as well as the crime. It is an unusual
but probably effective gambit.

David A Tomlinson is the National President of Canada's National
Firearms Association.